- [Seth] Hey folks, how's it goin?
Seth here from REtipster.com
and in this video I wanted to give you a heads up
on a educational course I took just recently
from a guy named Scott Todd.
And if you've been following the various land investing
teachers out there, Scott may be a familiar name
and face and voice for you.
And if you're totally new to this space,
then you're probably never heard of him.
In any event, Scott's backstory,
he is a fairly experienced land investor
and he has thrown his hat in the ring a few years ago
by releasing a couple of products.
And one of those products
is this educational course,
which basically teaches you accounting
for the land investing business.
And the reason I thought this
was something worth highlighting
is because I frankly don't know of anybody out there
right now who is teaching the subject of accounting
like at all.
And I've known Scott has had this course out there
for a while and I've always kind of been interested
just to get his take on it and see how he manages his books
and what kind of software he uses
and that kind of stuff.
But it wasn't until just recently
when I got ahold of him and asked if I could
go through it for free and put together this kind
of a video review for him.
And he said, "Sure, why not?"
So I was able to go through it for free
and I just wanted to let you know
what my thoughts were as I was going through it.
I'll give you a quick look at what the course looks like
so if you decide to sign up for this kinda thing
you can get a quick look at what comes with the package.
So let's jump into that right now.
So if you do decide to sign up for it,
the course looks like this.
All the content is hosted on another website
that he runs called Landmodo
where you can list your properties for sale.
But he's got this educational content hosted there.
So you'll get an account where you can log
into this particular website
and all of the modules are outlined over here.
And as you can see there are 14 modules
and each module is basically just a video.
And from what I can tell, I think this
was originally recorded
as a really, really, really long webinar.
And that was recorded and kind of broken out
into these 14 videos to create more of a long form course.
So I'll just quick give you a look at one of these modules
so you can see kind of what it looks like
and how he delivers the content.
- Welcome to accounting for land investors.
For those of you joining me
on the in California, west coast,
it's seven a.m.
Man, I am so honored that you guys are awake
and decided to share a Saturday with me.
Going through this type
of land investing accounting program,
I mean accounting's never exciting.
We're gonna try and make it exciting today.
So I want to let you know first
that it's extremely important that you understand
that the material that we're gonna cover here today
is my own material.
Meaning that it's material that I've either compiled,
it's stuff that I've worked with my accountant to compile.
It's stuff that I have researched.
I'm gonna provide all of this to you today.
For those of you that are joining me from last year,
there's a lot of material that's kind of the same.
There's some material that's a little bit different.
I'm gonna walk you through some of the changes
but essentially what you're gonna find
is that this is the program that you need
in order to make sure that you
are on a good solid foundation.
Look, over on the right side,
some of you have already figured out
when you couldn't hear me,
over on the right hand side, there's a chat bar.
Okay, make use of it, okay, ask questions.
I will make sure I'm pausing to review the chat
from time to time.
So I want to make sure your questions are getting answered.
So make sure that you're asking, okay?
So I'll keep watching over there.
If your connection's bad, you know,
it's an internet connection.
I stream on a good pipe here so essentially you just wanna
hit reconnect in webinar jam.
And remember everything today is being recorded.
Okay.
So again, legal disclaimer,
I gotta tell you that before you take action on this,
especially when it comes to some of the tax tips
I'm gonna talk about near the end.
Make sure that you're talking to an accountant
or a legal professional
because your situation may be different from mine.
So if something happened and you went
in front of the IRS and you said,
"Well, Scott said to do it,"
they're gonna be like, who's this guy?
So understand that you need to make sure
that your situation may in fact
be different so you need to make sure
that you have a good plan for you guys.
Now look, I've got a few goals for today.
Number one, accounting is a complex topic.
I get it, I understand it.
We like to joke at land geek bootcamp
about I love numbers and numbers love me.
I'm not gonna make you guys recite
that over and over and over again.
However, I will tell you that my goal here
is to make sure that I know that it's complex,
we're gonna slow down and make sure that you get it.
Okay, if you don't get it, if you still have questions,
no problem.
You're gonna have access to the Facebook group.
Ask questions away.
Ask about how to do this.
Ask about your journal entries.
Ask about whatever we're gonna talk about
that you're not clear of
and I'm gonna make sure that you get the answers
that you need, okay?
My number one goal for doing this class,
I did it last year and I wanted to do it again this year,
is because to me the financial statements
that you produce on a monthly basis
are so important to your business.
I come from a financial background.
I cannot imagine running my business
on a month to month basis without knowing exactly
how much profit, revenue.
Revenue's easy, you know how much money's
coming in the door.
But how much profit are you keeping?
And what about these terms deals
and what about all of this stuff?
And you hear a lot about well am I dealer?
Am I an investor?
What am I?
We're gonna break that down for you
so that you can go back
and talk to your accountant about it.
Or that you can go back and research however you are.
Maybe you're a doit-yourselfer, no problem.
Go back and research.
I'm gonna give you the points that you need to do.
What I like about accounting
is that it's really the language of business, right?
Essentially, it's how we keep score in business.
How do you know how well you're doing
throughout the year?
You can look at the revenue coming in
and you're like yeah, I'm fantastic.
And then I have seen businesses in my career
where they think it's great, now we got all this money
coming in the door every day.
But their expenses are out of wack,
or this is wrong or that's wrong.
Next thing you know they wake up to a financial nightmare.
And what I want to do is I want to give you the foundation
so that you understand this is what it means
to have a good set of numbers every single month.
How do you do that?
We're gonna break that down for you.
So again, accounting is your scoreboard.
In every sport they keep score,
there's the big scoreboard up there.
Business is no different, it's called accounting.
So that's what we're gonna do today.
So today's format, today we are going to do hands on,
meaning that I'm gonna start off
and I'm gonna assume that you don't even
have an accounting program set up.
And I'm gonna show you what I use.
I'm gonna show you how to go about setting it up
because maybe you're just starting out.
Maybe you have an accounting system
that you're already using.
Fantastic.
Watch how I'm setting it up
because maybe you can pull something in there.
Set something up differently for what you're going to do.
Okay?
We're gonna look at real case studies.
These are real deals.
I've changed the names but I'm gonna actually
show you the real numbers
and we're gonna apply these transactions
into our accounting system.
I'm gonna go through the spreadsheets
that I actually use in my business.
You're gonna get them at the end of it
but I'm gonna show you how my bookkeeper,
how my accounting people actually use these spreadsheets
on literally it's almost a daily basis
that we use these things.
And so I'm gonna show you how we do that as well.
And we're gonna learn together
how to do this so that you can duplicate it.
Now look, if you're watching this
and you're like man,
I do not want to be doing the bookkeeping
'cause I don't.
I don't do the bookkeeping in my business.
I have a bookkeeper that does it.
I found them off of Upwork.
Great people on Upwork but you can find somebody.
Maybe you want to find them locally.
You could give them this training program.
Give them the video.
Let them watch it, let them watch and learn
what you're about to learn.
And then you don't have to do it.
You can actually show them how to do it
through this material.
I'll teach 'em.
And then what you can do is you can go back
and double check their work, okay?
So look, let me give you an agenda
of what's gonna happen today, okay?
- So as you can see,
Scott's a pretty good dynamic speaker.
He's kind of fun to listen to.
He's good at taking some subject matter
that's fairly difficult to stay on track with
and a little bit boring to listen to
and making it as lively and as interesting as possible.
So kudos to Scott on that.
I thought he did a really good job
of delivering the information.
On the same coin though,
I don't think we can get away from the fact
that this is accounting.
And if you are a right-brained person,
if you have a difficult time paying attention
to details and numbers and symbols
and stuff like that, which frankly is the way
that I am.
I had a really, really hard time
getting through all my accounting and finance classes
in college.
If you're anything like that,
then I think you should definitely pop a NoDoz,
get some Red Bull, get some coffee, take it all,
'cause you're gonna need it.
'Cause as good of a job as Scott does
with trying to make this stuff fun,
it's still ultimately requires
that you, as the consumer of the content,
are actually attentive and doing the work
to understand what he's talking about.
That's something that only you can do
and that's just something you'll have to keep in mind
if you decide to jump into this kind of course
and go through it.
Each one of these videos ranges
from like 10 to 30ish minutes in length.
So I would say for this kind of thing,
it was me and if I was learning this from scratch,
I would probably take one of these videos a day
and not try to knock this all out in one sitting.
Because, man, I just don't think I would
have the attention span to do that.
But that's just me.
If you're somebody who likes this kind of stuff
maybe you'd be fine.
But it's the kind of content where I'd think you
would definitely benefit from actually
going through the steps as Scott shows how to do them.
And Scott uses an accounting software called Zero,
which I have not used myself,
but I have heard from several others who have
and I've never heard anybody say anything bad about it.
It's kind of like a different version of QuickBooks
that is entirely cloud-based.
You can pretty much log in from anywhere in the world.
And it also makes it a little bit easier
to share all of your accounting stuff.
Say if you have a third party involved,
something like Zero makes it really easy to do that.
I know there's also options out there like QuickBooks
does have a cloud-based version of their software as well.
As does Freshbooks and I'm sure there's others out there
that I'm forgetting.
Just so you know, if you want to follow along
with what Scott is doing, you'll want to get Zero
and make sure that you have an account there as well.
Just to give you an idea on the pricing for that,
you can see that right here.
And I don't recall which plan he uses.
I have to imagine if you're just
in the getting started phase,
this starter plan is probably gonna be sufficient
for what you need.
To just get into the system and follow along with Scott.
So just so you know about that,
that is part of this whole process as well
is working with Zero.
In addition to the videos at the very bottom here,
he's got a resources section,
where you can click on that.
I think it's right down here.
So once you get down here,
you can download an Excel spreadsheet
that he spends quite a bit of time explaining
how to use.
And it's basically a tool
that can help you calculate your actual profit
on installment sales and help communicate
and share things with your accountant
and a lot of other stuff.
I'm not gonna get into all that here
but I think it is a pretty solid spreadsheet
that's pretty helpful
and he definitely spends plenty of time
explaining how to use this thing
and why it's important and helpful
in your whole accounting operation.
Something else you can get are his Powerpoint documents
which is basically this right here
where he explains how
to set up some of the different accounts
in your Zero accounting system.
He also outlines some tax strategies
that you can put to work in the land of business.
Which I actually thought was really helpful
because I know land as a type of real estate asset
actually doesn't come with a lot of tax benefits.
Like there is no depreciation right off.
And since we're buying a lot of these properties all cash,
there's not like interest payment
that you can write off or anything like that.
But there are some things just in terms of
being an entrepreneur and running your own business.
And he kind of covers that stuff right here.
So that's fairly helpful.
And he's also got a copy of IRS publications 537 in here
where basically it just explains all the ins and outs
of how you define an installment sale
in the eyes of the IRS.
And a lot of other stuff that kind of goes into that.
It's some of the most boring reading I think available
anywhere on the planet,
but if you are interested in this kind of stuff
and all the technicalities it outlines, all that stuff
in this document here.
So that's there if you need it.
And then last but not least, there is a Facebook group.
So if you do sign up for this course
you can go ahead and join that.
And try to stay connected and communicate
with some of the other people
who have taken the course.
Looks like it's got about 111 members at the time
of this recording.
So, you know, there's at least a few people
in there that I'm sure would be more than happy
to chat with you about what they got going on
and what they're doing
and how they're handling their accounting system.
So overall, I thought the course was pretty decent.
If you're total accounting newbie
and I'm sure a lot of new land investors out there
do find themselves in that boat.
Then I don't see how you can go wrong
by signing up for something like this
and just devouring as much as you can.
And some of it may very well be over your head
but if you're willing to go slow
and really follow along step by step
with what Scott is doing,
I don't see how you can lose.
'Cause there is just so much
that goes into this whole process
and there's so much to learn.
And there's frankly not a lot of good teaching out there.
And especially not really any teaching
that I know of that talks specifically about accounting
in the land investing business.
So there's definitely some value to be had here.
In terms of things about the course
that I thought could be improved,
I thought first of all,
just from an aesthetic viewpoint,
this page was a little confusing.
Just in terms of understanding where I was supposed to go.
I kinda had like this sidebar over here,
and then this over here,
which is all the exact same stuff.
And when I go and click on the lessons,
I thought it woulda been sorta helpful
to have some kind of a written summary
beneath the video, maybe with some clickable links
if and when they're applicable.
And maybe just some kind of a naming scheme
to go along with each module
so that I have some kind of idea
of what is going to be discussed in each module.
Like if I want to learn how to do seller financing
and how to track payments,
or how to run reports,
or how to print off checks,
or how to do you name it,
I know he covers a ton of this stuff.
But I don't really know where.
And it would be nice to kind of just know exactly
where that stuff is so I could jump right to it.
But I don't really have any of that information as it is.
So I thought that might be one thing that could be improved.
And then the other thing,
I know this was recorded as a big long webinar.
Which is totally cool, but it looks like that webinar
was kind of just taken as is
and sliced into a number of different modules
and put on here without a lot of editing done
to like take out long silences.
And I thought it woulda been helpful
to kind of like shorten up these videos a little bit
just so that they're just a little bit shorter
and you can get through the meat of the content faster.
But with that being said,
I will say these videos are set up pretty nicely
in that you can speed them up if you want to.
So when I was going through these videos
I think I had it running on one point five
or one point seven five.
So I could basically just get through it a lot faster.
And since I already know a lot of the stuff,
I wasn't necessarily watching this
to learn for my own sake,
but more to understand what content is in the course.
It was very nice to have that ability,
to just kind of speed through these videos
whenever I needed to.
But other than that,
I thought it was a pretty well put together course
that covered a ton of material.
A lot of it was super super helpful
and I think it'll do a lot of good
for a lot of people who are interested
in this kind of thing.
And again, if you do want to go through this
just have a cup of coffee handy
and be ready to pay close attention
for long periods of time.
And actually go through the steps with Scott
as he's doing it.
'Cause just speaking for myself,
that is definitely the way that I learn the best.
Is when I'm actually doing it hands on.
And then each of these steps can really stick
in my memory as opposed to just watching it
and then forgetting it.
So if this sounds like something
that would be helpful to you
definitely go check it out.
We do have an affiliate relationship
with Scott and our affiliate link to this course
is right beneath this video.
If you want to check it out,
we do earn a small commission
if you sign up for the course through this link.
So if you do, thank you very much.
And if you don't, that's cool too.
I wish y'all the best in your journey
and if you are a land investor
and you're trying to figure out the accounting thing,
I hope you find this helpful.
Thanks for watching.
I'll talk to you next time.